After the Art – Issue 12 – June 2021

Welcome to After the Art’s twelfth issue.

We hope you enjoy these four essays:

“A Digression” by Heidi Czerwiec

“Inside/Outside” by Yoshiko Teraoka

“Of Monuments and Ruins” by Travis Scholl

“On the Wing” by Dana Delibovi

We’ve also started a Facebook page, which you can follow for posts about future issues as well as exhibits, articles, books, essays, and sites that might be of interest.

Continue reading “After the Art – Issue 12 – June 2021”

Inside/Outside

by Yoshiko Teraoka

I have been thinking about walls in times of crises. 

In a time of inversion – when left became right and right became left, moving forward meant moving back, and the contradictory impressions of the Covid-capitalist crisis were felt on sidewalks and screens, I found myself in a habit of returning to the same music and art, while stuck inside my domestic-turned-office walls. Comfort turned into compulsion when I began staring into the contradictions of a late painting by Mark Rothko.

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Of Monuments and Ruins

by Travis Scholl

I was recently reminded that the word nostalgia has Greek roots: nostos for home and algia (from algos) for pain, longing, loss. But the Greek roots are not ancient. The word was invented by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer in the dissertation he completed in 1688. Thus, nostalgia is distinctively modern in a way that is meant to feel, ironically enough, nostalgically ancient. In her landmark study The Future of Nostalgia, the late literary scholar Svetlana Boym distinguished between what she called “restorative” and “reflective” nostalgia. In her own words:

Continue reading “Of Monuments and Ruins”

On the Wing

by Dana Delibovi

July in New York City is mercilessly hot. Street-buckling, garbage-rotting, sweat-drenching hot. No place is hotter than the subway. Not long ago, most New York subway cars lacked air-conditioning. Riders opened windows, letting in a subterranean wind when the train sped through the dark tunnels. It wasn’t much help.

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